I just happened upon this list of quotes that were extremely good...I had been looking for lao tzu's one about patience on google and typed in "patience tao three"

Thank you, Matthew, for the inspirational thoughts. On this Palm Sunday, this first day of spring, this day of troubled news from many parts of our world, I find myself in great need of hope and inspiration to fill my mind and soul with healing thoughts, so that I can help do my part to heal the soul of our country, our world.

With that in mind, I offer these thoughts from those masters whom I consider wise.

Peace and joy and love and light. Peace, peace, peace.

madame defarge
*************

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
-- Mahatma Ghandi

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.
-- Confucius

It is better to live one day ethically and reflectively than to live a hundred years immoral and unrestrained.
-- Buddha

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them. Let us not beg for the stilling of the pain but for the heart to conquer it.
-- Rabindranath Tagore

A man becomes like those whose society he loves.
-- Hindu proverb

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.
-- Lao-tzu

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways -- either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.
-- Dalai Lama

The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Whatever befalls earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
(Chief Seattle)

Only when the last tree has died,
when the last river is poisoned,
when the last fish is caught,
only then will you realise that you can't eat money.
(Don’t know. There’s different versions of this too).

"Whenever I would rest I grasp a cup of wine,
Oblivious of all else in this great capital.
So vast are Heaven and Earth that I remain unknown,
An old man wandering by himself among mankind."
-- Chung-li Ch'uan

"None have lived longer than a stillborn child,
And old Peng Tsu died young.
Heaven and Earth are as old as I am,
And the ten thousand things are one."

-- Chuang Tsu

"You know, if you watch the cyclic energy behind the attacks on this
board, you will see the same cool pattern:

It starts with those who have nothing to say. They will author posts like this:

'Does anyone know how to maximize yin/yang energy?'

'Isn't it cool how I felt this light when I did my microcosmic orbit.'

'My meditation and their influence upon the population in Harlem, New York.'

Clearly these people have much deeper things the wish to ask, but haven't spent enough time walking the talk to even know what they are, let alone phrase them. So, they half-ass it around looking to start on-line relationships with
other numb-nutz who have less experience than they do.

On the other hand...

We have those who have gotten a little deeper and see how the problem is in all of that watery, desire-based stuff. They KNOW what the question is, but don't have the courage to say it. The question is:

'PLEASE HELP ME WITH THIS FUCKING MESS!!!'

Since nobody helps them, they spit all their deep shit on the board, which usually takes the form of ass-fucking, racism, etc.

Then again...

There is still a final category of idiot. I am talking about those who
THINK they know everything and drone on and on about some obfuscatory practice where on mixes the yin and the yang of some far off person and produces an inverted, upside-down steaming practice in outer space while riding a bicycle or whatever the fuck is the latest rage among IT professionals who also happen to be Taoists.

So the solution is:

IT professionals have got to get out of their heads and start doing some serious butt-fucking.

The ass-fuckers have got to do some steaming (no dead squirrels involved!).

The idiots have got to spend a little more time listening instead of talking.

The essence of divine experience is unending devastating bliss and an unshakable silent peace.
---Yogani

There are various ways to give it all up. You can ignore the physical world and its realities and trust in the universe. I did that, and it was a powerful experience. And one I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Surrendering to your inner awareness, however, and its intelligence and practicality in the worlds you live in, is the higher ground. Trusting yourself and the source of your intelligence is a more elegant version of freedom and personal productivity.
---David Allen

In the providence of the mind, what is believed to be true is true, or becomes true within certain limits, to be learnt by experience and experiment. In the providence of the mind, there are no limits.John C. Lilly

"We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!" Gary Johnston

"Have you noticed how much they look like orchids? Lovely!" Lazarus Long

"I conceal my amazement..." Wish I could remember

"Brought to you by your Department of Redundancy Department, and the Natural Guard" Firesign Theater

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood"button in my drawer

"And the ship went out into the high sea, and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.---

But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.

I found the following quote to be extremly interesting, and extremly good in synthesizing my feeling respect to the general new age mentality that I found in cheap spirituality. It originally comes from Faber, this quote being from p. 116 of New Age Thinking. But I found it in the Blog of Vyoma. A couple of years ago.

What we have here, in essence, is the enormously popular and deeply influential New Age notion of anything goes: anything achieves philsophical or, better, epistemological status if I "experience it for myself"; and if I "experience it for myself" in an "altered state of consciousness," why, then, so much the better. It would be difficult, of course, to over-stress the vapidity, the vacuity of such a notion, yet it is a notion that resides at the theoretical centre of New Age thiking. Imagine the poor wretch at the inquisitorial stake, on the verge of incineration, crying out his innocence to the hooded executioner and receiving in return the reply, "Silence, sinner, I know you're the Devil; I've experienced you personally as the Devil on several occasions, and once when I was in an altered state of consciousness." Not only is such thinking philosophically bankrupt and undeserving of professional respect, it is dangerous. It closes debate before debate can get started: "I experience this for myself, baby, so shut up!" Only the converted can participate -- one at a time. Each "theoretician" inahbits a self-contained, monadic capsule from which he determines the authenticity of his own experience, and by extrapolation the truth of the world or the nature of reality, without logical or epistemological or informational criteria beyond his own subjectivity, without intermeshing social, communicational, observational materials, without rigorous discussion and dialogue -- in short, without any standards for judgement. The result: epistemological kick-the-can, a philosophical world in which every position is of equal value and therefore no position is of any particular value -- no matter how diligently, how skillfully it is presented. "Well, man, I think I see what you mean about the many ways an experience can be interpreted, but this was still real for me, OK?" This is among the very worst aspects of New Age thinking -- I mean from an ideational angle, and it attests psychoanalytically to the New Ager's absolute unwillingness to probe the meaning of his wish-fulfilling thoughts and sensations, the ones that restore him to the before-separation-world of symbiotic fusion and omnipotence. Any fool is free to jump in with his "story," and no one dare chllange its "personal" veracity. This is the tyranny of "doctrine" in reverse, the tyranny of "doctrine" from the other side: "I experienced this, so f____ off!" Every person, every egomaniacal guru, every mystic, every doper, every "beginning shaman," every borderline schizophrenic in every borderline cult becomes a shaper of reality, a pronouncer of the truth.

"when you are silent they assume you don't have the reply to them

they will never undrestand that you are trying to respect them";

"Spiritual work is no guess work"; "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing";"no human investigation can be called real science if it can not be demonstrated mathematically"—Leonardo da Vinci

""Those who refuse to learn math are doomed to talk nonsense." — John McCarthy

I found the following quote to be extremly interesting, and extremly good in synthesizing my feeling respect to the general new age mentality that I found in cheap spirituality. It originally comes from Faber, this quote being from p. 116 of New Age Thinking. But I found it in the Blog of Vyoma. A couple of years ago.

It's all very well to complain about the absurdity of the human 'condition' - but unless this guy has some way to improve the situation, he's just another New Age Thinker who thinks his experiences are incredibly valid, just because they're his.

The only 'philosopher' (if you could call him that) that I found had some sort of framework to deal with the problems of shifting from the Aristotalian, "There is one objective view-point" - to the Quantum Mechanics inspired, "There exist only multiple points of view - and never a singular, all encompassing point of view" - his name was Alfred Korzybski. Although his book "Science and Sanity" is a difficult (and long!) read, it can really illuminate people's understandings about the implicit reality that is created through such things as our language.

So...

"The map is not the territory."

"There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking."

It's all very well to complain about the absurdity of the human 'condition' - but unless this guy has some way to improve the situation, he's just another New Age Thinker who thinks his experiences are incredibly valid, just because they're his.

I don't think this guy is complaining about the "absurdity of the human condition". People have lived for thousands of years in multiple cultures without induging in the excessive relativism that comes out of saying: "I experienced this for myself, and so it is true".

"when you are silent they assume you don't have the reply to them

they will never undrestand that you are trying to respect them";

"Spiritual work is no guess work"; "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing";"no human investigation can be called real science if it can not be demonstrated mathematically"—Leonardo da Vinci

""Those who refuse to learn math are doomed to talk nonsense." — John McCarthy

People have lived for thousands of years in multiple cultures without induging in the excessive relativism that comes out of saying: "I experienced this for myself, and so it is true".

I think the problem is not with believing that something is true for you... the problem imo is when people think that whatever 'truth' they've discovered, is true objectively and so, true for everyone. It's this idea, that something can be 'objectively true' - is what causes so many problems.

However spotting problems and coming up with reasons is pretty much mental masturbation (I've indulged in this myself quite often ), unless it results in something you can do to solve the problem.